You are right. Fires can race through the crowns. In 1933 the first of the Tillamook Burn fires in Oregon which ultimately burned 13 billion board feet of timber, carried debris nearly 500 miles out to sea. In sum it burned 360,882 acres:
"...The two fires, fed by the intense winds, merged to form an immense explosion of flames reaching 18 miles across. This new surge created a 40-mile wide mushroom cloud that reached approximately 40,000 feet into the sky. Debris reached ships nearly 500 miles out to sea, and a thirty mile stretch of the Oregon coast was littered with charred debris up to 2 feet deep. Northwest Oregon and southeastern Washington was shrouded in the smoke that obscurred the sun and turned day into night.In just 20 hours, the combined Tillamook Fire consumed 240,000 acres, or half the state of Rhode Island." Source: Kemp, J. Larry. Epitaph For the Giants. [link now dead]
You mean we had global warming causing these fires as far back as 1933? It must have been FDR's environmental policies that caused this.